Maida C. Odom died on October 24, 2026, at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, of complications from metastatic breast cancer. She was 73.
She joined The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1978 and is believed to have been only the second Black woman to report for the paper. Charyn Sutton was the first. Odom covered school desegregation, AIDS, the NAACP and the Nation of Islam, and in 1985 she spent more than 28 hours covering the MOVE standoff in West Philadelphia. In December of that year she wrote: “There were no flowers, no hymns, no sorrowful tears.” The assignment later became a play she wrote, Move Mocks Us All.
In 2025 she said: “What I learned most from all of this is when you sow seeds of hatred, you can’t control how they grow.”
She was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1952 and grew up in Akron, Ohio. She earned a journalism degree from Northwestern University and did graduate study at the University of Pennsylvania. She reported for the Akron Beacon Journal and the Dayton Daily News before Philadelphia, edited a newsletter for the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees, left the Inquirer in 2000, and moved into documentary film, co-producing 1199 at 25 in 2002.
She taught journalism at Temple University until she retired in 2019. There she ran an internship program that paired her college students with Philadelphia high school students. “By the end of the program, students feel very committed and often tell me that they don’t want to stop helping out,” she said in 2012.
The people who worked beside her describe the same woman. “She was an exacting journalist,” said Annette John-Hall, a former Inquirer reporter. “She knew how to get past the first layer of a story and get under the second layer.” Arlene Notoro Morgan, a former assistant managing editor at the paper, said Odom “certainly was fearless in covering the streets.” Roy H. Campbell, a longtime colleague, said she “had a low tolerance for BS.” Sandra Long Weaver, a former vice president of newsroom operations, said she “was interested in promoting people of color and seeing people succeed.”
John DiCarlo, Temple’s student media director, said the thing almost everyone said. “She had so many career achievements she could have talked about, but I rarely ever heard her talk about herself.”
Odom was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority and taught Sunday school at St. Matthew AME Church, where services are set for November 11. She is survived by her brother, the retired 6ABC reporter Vernon Odom, who said, “She was intense.”
